Sat in this for awhile today. Talking to Jesus and letting his love pour over me. I needed to forgive some people. I needed to know this deep inside my heart, not just on my lips of faith. Jesus kept taking me to the words he spoke while hanging on the cross. He said, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” We simply do not know what we do. This forgiveness is the only way Jesus knew because he knew our way very well. He still does. We do not know what we do to each other in search for our own way. Yet Jesus pleads with the Father to forgive our "unknowing". It is as if Jesus, after spending many years with us; with men and women, having dinner with prostitutes and thieves, navigating the religious confusion of the Pharisees and Sadducees, fishing with the disciples and teaching the hungry masses…he comes to understand us. He pleads on our behalf in the middle of his pain from the very weight of the sin we do not understand- the sin we cannot see. He is not saying that our sin does not matter, that our sin will not have consequences, or that we do not make meaningful choices. He is saying that we simply do not know what we do and then his compassion sweeps over him like a deep waves of an ocean storm...he is left with the raw heart of love for you...for me. There are echoes of this compassion from the moment Jesus wept over Jerusalem.
Malcolm Guite said it well with this thought:
Jesus comes near and he beholds the city
And looks on us with tears in his eyes,
And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity
Flow from the fountain whence all things arise.
He loved us into life and longs to gather
And meet with his beloved face to face
How often has he called, a careful mother,
And wept for our refusals of his grace,
Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping,
Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way,
Fatigued compassion is already sleeping
Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day.
But we might waken yet, and face those fears,
If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.
Well said. Jesus weeps first for our unknowing and yet he presses in towards the way of suffering the cross where he will plead from the depths of his heart. I was reminded that he continues to weep for my stumbling towards forgiveness. The Father’s heart is to forgive as the story in the prodigal- he forgives because he loves. When we withhold the journey of forgiving others from ourselves we shrink back from the voyage of Jesus in our identifying with his forgiveness. Jesus asks us to walk with him in the unknowing we feel in forgiving others. In a way he is saying that we must abandon the limits we place on forgiving others and ourselves. Yet he weeps. Jesus says for us to forgive one another seventy times seven…this is a lot…and the spirit of this is continual forgiveness...and we will stumble in it if we are moving towards it. There are sins that others have done to us, especially the ones that touch our sexuality, that seems to have no room in our heart for forgiving. We simply cannot imagine what forgiveness would be like, it feels so looming and dark.
Yet I find this statement so deeply true-I do not know what all that it is I do. Neither do they. None of us know what we do. We do not know who we are. In other words I am stumbling most of the time in and out of forgiveness.
This does not mean that there are still not memories that spill from our consciousness- times when we are deeply sad and even angry for the effect of others sin on us- yet it must always be seen in the light of our not knowing and his knowing- deeply knowing our own sin and others sin and the effect it has…and we are not offered to know that knowing in full- perhaps in part connected with the knowledge of good and evil-we are asked by God to seek the tree of life, not clarity of good and evil. Diving into the life Jesus offers will speak a way in its own clarity and in its own time...in balance with love.
Yet to those of us who are blessed with the grace of knowing Jesus-we get to know him and there we are protected from the full pain, the full remorse, the full weight. This is the sheltering, the mothering of God for our very soul. Not in a denial of sin, not in a light patting of the head. We are given the life of Jesus. We are given his eyes- we don't see well from the streets. We see through God’s direction, protection, and sustaining. There are times when all is safe as he judges it to be safe for us- he will gift us with his eyes for others- the deepest compassion, tenderness, justice, and love that eyes could ever feel for the world. He knows our very fear, limits, and condition…and he weeps, he pleads, he loves!
